My Exposé for Windows Vista

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My Exposé for WIndows Vista – I’m amused by the fact that after 5 years of development, you still need to install a productivity application to make Vista as easy to use as OS X.
Seems like Microsoft was too busy making their window/application switcher in 3-D:
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Articles of Interest

Kids, the Internet, and the End of Privacy: The Greatest Generation Gap Since Rock and Roll
from New York Magazine:

Kids today. They have no sense of shame. They have no sense of privacy. They are show-offs, fame whores, pornographic little loons who post their diaries, their phone numbers, their stupid poetry–for God’s sake, their dirty photos!–online. They have virtual friends instead of real ones. They talk in illiterate instant messages. They are interested only in attention–and yet they have zero attention span, flitting like hummingbirds from one virtual stage to another.

Web Standards: it’s about quality, not compliance
from Design View:

In spite of the widespread acceptance of Web standards by a specific segment of the design and development community, hosts of professionals – those out there right now creating the Web – are working in direct opposition to these standards. A significant reason for why this is happening and how those not working with Web standards justify their activity boils down, I believe, to something regrettably simple: nomenclature.

Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us

You could put your link at the bottom, think of the exposure!!! – familiar-sounded, isn’t it?

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Stopping SPAM email. Well, maybe slowing it down…

First off, I’d like to give credit to this discovery to my friend Bryan Larrick.
I use Dreamhost for all my hosting, as well as the hosting I use for all my clients. They have unbeatable pricing, good support, and in the event that something goes wrong, they’re the first ones to admit it on their support blog. They’re also pretty accommodating if you have particular custom settings you might need in PHP (I’m still on a shared server environment so I can’t tweak my server settings since it’s not a dedicated box). One thing I’ve never taken advantage of is their domain registration service.
For the last 7 years I’ve used Register.com for all my domain registrations and I’ve pointed all my clients to them as well. They’re more expensive than other places, like GoDaddy, but I didn’t care, because they were reliable. Within the last few years they also started offering privacy protection for an additional charge but I’ve never used this extra service.
Then my friend Bryan emails and says since moving his domain from Register.com to Dreamhost, the amount of SPAM he gets has almost stopped.
No way, I think.
Since I have an account with Dreamhost and domain transfer is free, I figure, what the hell, I’ll do a little experiment with thecombustionchamber.com and make Dreamhost my registrar. So I make the switch, making sure to have Privacy Protection CHECKED.
It’s been 2 days and already the amount of SPAM I get has significantly dropped.
Now chances are I could have done the same thing will Register.com, but I would have had to pay another $10 a year on top of the annual $35 renewal fee. At Dreamhost it’s free. Even if you don’t use Dreamhost for hosting, domain registration will only put you back about $10.
Thanks for the heads up Bry. I just hope this low SPAM environment lasts.

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Mac Utility of the Day: Safari’s Activity Window

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*Note to Firefox users – I know Firefox has a similar activity utilities you can install, but so far I haven’t found them nearly as easy to use as Safari’s.
Ever need to know what a web page is comprised of? What kinds of SWF’s, JPG’s and CSS files it’s using? In Safari, simply go to Window>Activity to see what’s going on behind-the-scenes on web pages.
This window comes in handy particularly when troubleshooting why certain elements aren’t loading a page, such as cross domain issues with Flash or simply to find out you gave an image the wrong filename.
The Activity window is also great on giving you insight into how someone else built their site, or how something works.
I’ve been using this built-in utility since Safari was released with OS X and I figured it I should give it an entry.

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iPhone user rating?

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I’m really tired of seeing legitimate news sites posting articles that are gossip, hearsay, speculation – whatever you’d like to call it. Technology sites such as Gizmodo and Engadget are notorious for it (some would argue that this is what their specialty is) as well as 500% of all celebrity entertainment sites.
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I ran across something today that I think ventures into new bullshit territory – a user rating on a non-existent product. Today is January 19th, 2007 and almost 300 users have rated the iPhone on Yahoo.
Pretty amazing.
Pretty meaningless.
Yahoo, DWMMFT.

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Netflix to offer movie downloads – this was the next logical step for them. Interesting that the service is proposing to be streaming not downloadable video. They allows them to nicely step around DRM issues, but it also doesn’t let people burn their movie to disc…
David Pogue’s iPhone review – I’m really starting to dig what this guy has to stay. He’s smart and doesn’t take himself too seriously – two very good qualities to have.

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iPhone

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I’m sorry, I’m trying to remember what Palm CEO Ed Colligan was saying about Apple entering the cell phone market… damn, what was it again?
… oh yeah, this is what he said.
I’m not going to go on and on like a fanboy on the iPhone, I think you should just watch the keynote that Steve Jobs delivered:
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/qtv/keynote/
I was talking with my brother today about how Steve opens up by showing all the smartphones currently on the market – BlackJack, Treo, Motorola Q, Nokia E62…. and how they all suck, and why they suck, where they fall short. My brother pointed out that you don’t realize a product is crappy until Jobs tells you it is (Actually my Treo 600 WAS pretty good).

Trying to compare the Treo to the iPhone
is like comparing a skateboard to a hoverboard.

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In the News

Video: Apollo: The best of Adobe’s Flash and Reader – I’m still trying to wrap my head around this Apollo program. Merging Acrobat Reader and the Flash Player? I guess this is an example of a technology where I need to see a practical application to understand the reasoning behind it.
Video: Gates on Apple’s ‘huge disadvantage’ – whatever works for you Bill. You do what works for you and I’ll go pre-order my iPhone.

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Learnin’

Switch from an art director with technical experience to a technical director has been a bit jolting, but in a fun, nerdy, roller coaster, kind-of-way. Here’s some information I’ve found useful, some of these I knew, some I didn’t:
OEMoriginal equipment manufacturer
CDNContent Delivery Network
SDKsoftware development kit
APIapplication programming interface
white label product – is a product or service produced by one company (the producer) that is then rebranded by other companies (the marketers) to make it appear as if it was created by them (from Wikipedia).

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Anti-Social Media …. Wisdom in Crowds?

In one corner we have this article by Andy Rutledge:

The wisdom of crowds, consumer–generated ads, news importance selected by the masses, infotainment… New media today is for the people, by the people. The Web employs this model with increasing saturation, but it’s not just the Web that is doing so. All media, many large businesses, and most of the newly forming cultural mechanisms are adopting this nonsense.

… and in this corner we have CNET’s article (found via Slashdot.org):

If a war in the Middle East is seen as likely, for instance, oil prices will probably increase. Hayek’s insight showed that the results can be surprisingly accurate, as long as enough people are allowed to wager real money on the outcome.
Prediction markets
Now, technology firms are using a modern twist on this idea, called prediction markets, as a way to save money, harness the distributed knowledge of their rank-and-file employees, and even answer questions like: When will this software ship? And what will memory prices be like in a few months?

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